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As the popularity of the Flaming Lips has grown, so has the size and scope of the group's live shows.

But Wayne Coyne, the group's singer, has been doing a lot of thinking lately about maybe toning down the concerts, as the festive mood doesn't always work well with the songs that are darker in tone.

"Sometime in the past, we've built this way that we do our shows from being little shows to bigger shows and bigger shows with more and more ridiculous stuff going on," he said during a recent phone interview from his Oklahoma City residence. "In the past couple of years, we've started to think, `Do we stop doing this ridiculous show?' -- because sometimes I feel that it works with some of our songs, but I didn't feel like it was always working with some of our newer material."

With the April release of the Flaming Lips' 13th studio album, "The Terror," Coyne and his cohorts have decided to chart a new course for their live performances.

"I think once we decided that we were going to do `The Terror' as a piece of music that had this certain mood about it, I think we were like, `Let's become this music,' as opposed to being the Flaming Lips that also do this music," he said. "So we said, `Let's become this music for a while and see where it takes us and see what we become.'

"It sounds like a silly thing to say, but if you don't follow your heart and follow the purpose of your mind, you don't want to do this. In the way that we work and the way that we make music and all that, we demand that we follow that. If we don't, we feel really stupid and useless.

"In our place as artists -- and I know that sounds really pretentious -- we must do what we must do and bear the bad consequences or reap the good benefits and go from there."

Fans attending the concert Monday night, July 15, at the Toyota Presents the Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford shouldn't be too worried, however. As Coyne puts it: "I don't think we can ever do just a straight concert."

"We've changed it and it has different things, but it's still about having an experience. It was never the idea that we would just stand there and play our instruments. We always knew that we would do a different type of show. We're agitated and intense people and our audience is the same way. We want you to have other things that come into it where you have a bigger experience.

"We like creating an atmosphere, and a mood, and a way of playing the songs. It's visual and it's about the experience and the intensity and the dynamics and all of that. As much as what we've worked (the live show) into now, give us another year or so of working and doing different types of songs and I think it will be quite radical."

Before "The Terror," the group's last release was "The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends," which saw the band collaborating with such artists as Nick Cave, Ke$ha, Erykah Badu and Yoko Ono.

That record grew out of a vow by the band to release new songs every month in 2011, which led to EPs with such acts as Neon Indian, Prefuse 73 and Lightning Bolt.

Coyne said working with different artists was refreshing, and his band took something away from each project to add to its own mix.

"We started to see how much we liked it and it widened what we thought of our own music and what we thought of the ways of making music," he said. "In the beginning of 2011, where we had the sort of manifesto that we would put out three or four new songs every month, we thought it would be kind of boring if it was just us. So we thought every other month we would just get some weirdo group to do stuff with us and see where that led us.

"But we love that and we made a lot of great friends and did a lot of crazy (freaking) music, simply because it wasn't just us pulling all the strings. I mean, Yoko Ono gets in there and we were like, `What do we do?'

"For any artist, to get out of your comfort zone is such an exhilarating, beautiful thing. ... You have to go to areas that you are not familiar with. Doing those things and having those deadlines and doing the scheduling, I think all of those things led us to the making of a record like `The Terror' with such confidence.

"It ended up being such a unique-sounding album, even in our canon of records that we've made. I think without having done all that stuff with other artists and groups, I think we wouldn't have been as sure about it."